I'm currently working and writing on my Master thesis in Information Architecture (official study description: link), which I will hand-in on August 2nd, 2010. At the end of August 2010, I will defend my thesis and furthermore initiate an 11th semester focusing on business development in connection to my thesis product.
I like working with IT and especially with a user-centered approach focusing on user needs and behavior. My bachelor studies in culture and language studies gave me linguistic, semantic and communicative skills, but I could not ignore my flair for computers. I chose to take on a Master's in IA because I like how the field is placed right in the middle of a series of disciplines like user experience design to usability and interface design, which are all areas I find intriguing and take on as a designer. I like to design navigation and work flows, interfaces and site structures and hopefully multiple cooler things as I learn through experience.
Information architecture encompasses a wide range of problems. But regardless of the specific context or objectives of a given information architecture project, our concern is always with creating structures to facilitate effective communication. This notion is the core of our discipline. - Jesse James Garrett
Internship Cycles
During my 8th semester I went to work with three different Danish companies in three-week cycles. These were meant to resemble a "traditional" internship semester and gave me the opportunity to work in a more case-based environment with a high focus on getting things done and presented to the ones in charge. I learned a lot about myself in relation to my future role as a designer of information architecture. I worked with the Municipal District of Aalborg, the communication department of Region Nord and NetDansk.
Key competences
- Skilled in language and text production + analysis
- Content Strategy
- Structures, personas, scenarios and benchmarking
- User testing and involvement, workshops and usability testing
- Organisation: taxonomy, categorisation, labelling, findability, SEO and metadata
- Interface design: prototyping, wireframing, sketching
- User needs, environments, cultures and ecologies
- Heuristic and expert evaluation
- Inter-cultural communication and organisational knowledge
- Strong sense of entrepreneurship (for more see 'Projects')
- Project management (e.g. theoretical and some practical experience with Scrum)
- Agile development
Technical competences
- Extensive CMS experience (mainly Durpal, MOSS, WordPress, Typo3 and Joomla)
- HTML and PHP
- Basic level understanding of CSS
- Adobe Fireworks, Illustrator, Photoshop, Lightroom
- Pixelmator
- OmniGraffle Professional
- Mockingbird and other live-wireframing tools
- Mindjet MindManager
- Usability testing (incl. working with the software Silverback
- Basic level understanding of Flash and ActionScript 3
- Basic level understanding of Javascript and jQuery
